Social Media

4 Tools to Enhance Brand Engagement on Facebook

Over the past few years, Facebook marketing has moved from the domain of early adopters to a mainstream focus for nearly all businesses. During that time, a large number of social media marketing tools have emerged to help companies reach and engage with fans, run promotions and contests, and even integrate Facebook Ad programs with the rest of their social marketing.

But while most marketers are currently using the myriad applications that allow them to run their ongoing programs, they may not be as familiar with tools they can use to enhance their day-to-day activities and make their programs more effective.

Here are four services that offer specific functionality to boost the impact of your Facebook marketing every day.

1. EdgeRank Checker

Several billion pieces of content and “Stories” are shared on Facebook every day, so it would be completely overwhelming if the news feed showed all of the possible stories from your friends and the brands you like. For this reason, Facebook created an algorithm — known in the industry as “EdgeRank” — to predict how interesting each story will be to each user and decide which stories will appear in a news feed.

While this may benefit the typical Facebook user, it creates a challenge for brands. If your posts aren’t performing well, fewer people will see them. In fact, according to data from EdgeRank Checker and AllFacebook, the average Facebook brand post reaches only about 17% of its fans due to this filtering mechanism.

“Understanding and leveraging EdgeRank is quickly becoming the new social ‘organic SEO,’” says Chad Wittman, founder of EdgeRank Checker. “Brands that are able to leverage EdgeRank to their advantage, without heavily relying on paid media, will be able to maximize efficiently their Facebook ROI.”

EdgeRank Checker has developed an algorithm that measures the average effect of EdgeRank on a brand's content. With an understanding of how EdgeRank is impacting its content, a brand is then able to begin the process of improving this average effect.

EdgeRank Checker’s free tool allows you to see your “EdgeRank Score” and your best and worst average days of the week, while the “pro” plan (which starts at $15 per month) gives you more in-depth analysis and recommendations to boost your rank.

2. PageLever

PageLever is another analytics tool that brands use to measure engagement and boost newsfeed visibility. Used by four of the top ten Facebook Brand Pages, PageLever shows where your fans come from and which ones are leaving, as well as the gender and location of the people who are interacting with your content. You can also use PageLever to identify and drill down into major spikes in your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to understand what happened on a particular day.

By using PageLever, you can see how many fans you're actually reaching with your content (i.e. how much content makes it through EdgeRank's filtering mechanism) and use this information to understand which content is performing better in the news feed. For example, a media site could use this to figure out whether articles about Androids or iPhones are more popular on Facebook. You can also see peak traction times, so you can make better decisions about post timing.

PageLever product pricing starts at $99 per month.

3. Alerti

Alerti is a social media monitoring and management service that continuously scans all types of sources (online press, blogs, forums, microblogs, social networks, videos, photos, etc.) to allow you to follow what is being said about you, your brand or your competitors on the Internet. You can then use that information to measure the engagement of your communities and to interact with them.

One of the most interesting ways you can use Alerti is to find and republish grassroots brand content that other people are sharing. Marketing consultant Murray Newlands recommends that brands leverage Alerti capability to identify and repurpose user-generated content within your Facebook Timeline feed to boost engagement.

"Brands are built in many ways by what others say about them and the conversations they engage in, and what consumers say about a brand is also more trusted and influential than what a brand says about itself,” says Newlands. “Brands need to understand and maximize the potential of that material — using Alerti, they can increase engagement on a day-to-day basis by sharing positive and popular content from their fans and influencers.”

4. Infinigraph

InfiniGraph takes the idea of EdgeRank a step further by pre-filtering your social media content to only the most engaging and viral. Its interface enables you to understand what content is hottest with your audience at the moment, mapping your fans to the Facebook posts and tweets they’re interacting with the most as well as the other brands they engage with on social media.

InfiniGraph starts by tracking your most active fans and followers. Then, it discovers what they do on other Facebook pages and Twitter profiles. This reveals the brands with which you have fans in common.

Through a process it calls “Hypercuration™,” InfiniGraph crowdsources trending content across many sites and discovers what is the most viral and would likely be of interest to your fans. Armed with this knowledge, you can then repost this pre-filtered content on your Facebook page -– proven content has a good chance of increased interaction on your Facebook Page, which will then improve your EdgeRank.

InfiniGraph’s pricing starts at $1,500 per month.

What are some of the tools you use to boost your Facebook marketing programs? Let us know in the comments.

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